Lamps art nouveau — the style that ran from about 1890 to 1910 — took the one thing every previous lighting tradition had avoided and made it the subject: the curve that does not repeat. Stems rise like plant stalks and bend back on themselves, arms end in tulip or lily heads, glass is tinted and iridescent rather than clear, and bronze is patinated green or brown instead of polished. Nothing on a genuine piece is symmetrical for its own sake. If you can fold the drawing down the middle and both halves match, it is probably a different style.
These two get confused constantly and they are opposite instincts, separated by a world war and by an entirely different idea of what a machine is for.
| Art nouveau, roughly 1890 to 1910 | Art deco, roughly 1920 to 1939 | |
|---|---|---|
| Line | Organic, asymmetric, the whiplash curve | Geometric, stepped, symmetrical |
| Motifs | Plants, insects, the human figure with flowing hair | Sunbursts, chevrons, fluting, the ziggurat |
| Glass | Coloured, opalescent, iridescent, leaded | Frosted, moulded, opal white, clear and cut |
| Metal | Patinated bronze, darkened brass | Chrome, nickel, polished brass |
| Attitude to machines | Suspicious. The value is in the hand of the maker | Enthusiastic. The machine age is the subject |
If you are choosing between them for a room, the practical difference is that art nouveau softens a hard interior and art deco sharpens a soft one. Art deco lamps covers the second of the two.
Germany and Austria. Slightly more restrained, with the botanical motif often reduced to a stylised line. The Vienna branch pushed further towards the grid and effectively invented the transition to art deco.
Italy, named after the London shop that sold the fabrics. Lighter and more decorative, with wrought iron used where France used bronze.
Catalonia. The most structural version, where the curve runs through the whole building rather than the fittings alone, and where wrought iron and ceramic mosaic do the work that glass does elsewhere.
The American branch, and the one with the strongest surviving identity. Leaded glass shades assembled from hundreds of individually cut pieces, in dragonfly, wisteria and laburnum patterns, over bronze bases. It has its own rules about how the glass is made and lit — see Tiffany chandeliers for the ceiling forms.
This is the part that most often goes wrong, because a shade designed for a 1900 filament behaves very differently under a modern source.
One piece does, and more than one usually does not. The style is dense and it was designed for rooms that were equally dense. Against plain plaster and simple furniture, a single patinated bronze fitting with coloured glass reads as a deliberate object; three of them read as a museum room.
Tiffany is the American branch of art nouveau, so it belongs inside the style rather than beside it. The distinguishing feature is the construction: hundreds of individually cut pieces of glass wrapped in copper foil and soldered, rather than a blown or cast shade. European art nouveau more often uses cameo, opalescent or moulded glass in one piece.
Yes, and that is part of why the style looks the way it does. Domestic electric light arrived in the 1880s and 1890s, at exactly the moment this style was forming, so art nouveau is the first decorative tradition drawn for the electric lamp rather than adapted from a candle or a gas mantle. That is why the shades point downward and outward in ways a gasolier never could.
A single fitting in the room people arrive in — a hall or a stairwell — where it has space around it and gets seen from more than one level. Art nouveau chandeliers covers the multi-arm frames for exactly that position, including how to size one against a stairwell.
Keep everything else plain. The period's own interiors were saturated, but a modern room reads the style as a signal rather than as a whole language, and one signal is enough. Plain walls, plain furniture, one curved bronze object.
